


With Coherence, Sense, and Grace

by captainworsley



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Emotional Baggage, Gen, Grifting, M/M, Manipulation, silverflint
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-28
Updated: 2018-07-28
Packaged: 2019-06-17 20:25:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15469356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainworsley/pseuds/captainworsley
Summary: John and James' friendship and intimacy shown through their mutual emotional tension.  John is the only man James has ever met who is truly out of his league.  One chapter for each season in which John calls James out on his shit.  Alternating POVs will happen.





	With Coherence, Sense, and Grace

**Author's Note:**

> For Chapter 1: spoilers up until S1 E4. I did not edit or reread this so it may be updated soon. I've been thinking about this fic for like eight months and I suddenly had a lot of feelings I needed to get out.

John was used to holding back death at the door by just being charming.

He'd left the house one night when he was just a boy, maybe eleven, and walked to a tavern to start picking through the refuse pile out back for some extra food. His little sister had been crying and hungry while his mother had done nothing and continued to drink spirits. John found a whole half-loaf of bread that had wine spilled on part of it and put it in his coat pocket. It was going to be an okay night, perhaps.

When the tavern proprietor threatened him with a riding crop for trespassing, he'd smiled. At the time, this was already his best and most valuable asset--a beautiful, wide smile and eyes full of love and innocence, an expression he knew even then could save his life. "I'm sorry, sir," he'd said. "I just needed some bread to feed to my baby sister, sir." And the tavern proprietor had given him a piece of pork, too, instead of hitting him.

He had also used his charms to lower the defenses of a drifter that he'd soon steal a horse from, because he needed to leave town to escape the group of bandits that he'd fallen in with who realized that he was taking more than his share after robberies, though that hadn't been because they could count, but because one of them had drunkenly noticed that his coin sack was heavier than his own.

He'd never needed to do the act for long because he found it so easy to move on. His mother and his sister being dead helped, but so did the fact that every person he met had weaknesses and needs, and finding out what those were was something of a sport. Sometime figuring out these puzzles just grew his disdain and made it easier to cheat them out of everything they had. 

Once in awhile, he'd grow to like someone. He had yet to grow to respect another man. Some women, yes, and children, but never another man. Men were usually only motivated by greed and fear. He knew because he felt this himself, every day. His fear motivated his greed. He was afraid of getting stuck in a place like the room where his sister died of fever, or like the towns he'd passed through with one tavern and two prostitutes and no doctors. It was easier to take from others than to settle down and become a part of these systems. The loneliness he felt when he was by himself in a quiet place frequently threatened to eat him alive. How could he stop when the routine of charming, grifting, stealing, and disappearing prevented any and all dull moments?

The one time he'd tried to go straight, by joining a merchant ship, he was bored within days--all the order, the duties, the ranks. He did, however, like the sea, and the warm weather, and the constant movement of the ship and the sounds of men's voices at all hours. He never slept as well as he did when there was commotion, and ocean noises were his favorites, but he couldn't ever lie and say that he wasn't a bit fucking relieved when the merchant ship was boarded by pirates.

Captain Flint was not nearly as easy to read as every other man he'd met in his travels, and John knew that with every maneuver he'd made, he was risking his own death more directly and aggressively than he ever had before. What could possibly motivate this brooding, ragged man to his actions? John wracked his brain with it. He had a gentlemanly, well-read, educated manner about him. He thought tactically and said little, as if the act of forming words drained him emotionally. John could tell straightaway that he'd been trained by the Royal Navy; low-class as he was, he'd met naval officers on many occasions and Flint shared their vocabulary. 

In John's view, every man in Nassau was a pirate because they loved being a pirate and because England had fucked them in their previous lives. James Flint was a pirate for the same reasons, John could see--he had lost something. But he took no delight in it like most men did. To be a pirate for other men was the endgame; they had won. They had gold and sex and drink and brotherhood and everything that England said they didn't deserve.

But Flint did not see himself as having won. Despite being a ship's captain with a fearsome reputation, Flint behaved as would a man who had nothing, who was still clawing up from the grave that had been dug for him.

John's reluctance to die at his hand came, in no small part, from wanting to know what secret kept Flint so sharp, and what the captain's true plan was. Money meant nothing to him, John could see, beyond what it could achieve. He showed no interest in sex with women or with men. He drank, but not to celebrate or to cope, more like as a routine. And while he clearly had respect for and bonds with his men, he kept them at arm's length. And John knew he was not necessarily always loyal to his men--as something of an expert on disloyalty, he could spot it miles off. But Flint was loyal to something else. John wanted to know what that was. He couldn't help himself. That loyalty was in fact so fierce that despite the captain's dishonesty, he exuded a very real and principled trustworthiness. It was a craft that John hoped to pick up alongside him.

So when he said, after divulging most of the Urca schedule from memory, that perhaps he and Flint would be friends by the time they found their prize, he did mean it, more than he usually might have. Maybe 25 per cent. Or more? Perhaps he half-meant it? When you watch someone beat a man to death with his hands in front of hundreds of spectators and then work them up into a frenzy on the strength of a beautiful lie, you want to know what could cause him to lie (and to kill) with such conviction. An additional challenge would be making sure that Captain Flint didn't pick up on his bit.

"Trying to play me against my own crew will not help your cause," Flint had told him. But Flint was helping him by teaching him how to cook a pig, for example, which was very important to his good standing with the crew but also amused John more than he wanted to admit, though he did tease him about it. 

John had quite enjoyed the thrill of watching Flint's face in the sunset when he told him that Billy knew about the Barlow woman. He thought he saw a flicker of fear in the captain's eyes, but it passed quickly, and instead changed to a stony resolve.

That night, John noticed him pacing as he doled out the last of the fresh meat, drinking water, and beer for the night (the rest of the evening's carousing, in the Fuck Tent, would be with private stock rather than shared rations). It had been a busy day, but Flint didn't seem bothered by the events as much as others. Amputating a man's leg beneath a hove-down ship and conveniently letting a would-be mutineer get crushed to death usually puts a spring in a man's step. But John could see him, walking alone along the beach, slowly, watching the toes of his boots in the sand.

John approached him cautiously and Flint turned at the sound of his footsteps, steadying himself, removing whatever trace of his private thoughts he'd had on his face. "I've heard," John said, with his best smile on his face, "and these are just rumors, that we are striking out tomorrow before dawn. That a formal announcement is pending."

"It's true," Flint said, not making eye contact, and instead staring at a small orange smudge on the horizon, which John took to be the object of the captain's rage. "We were betrayed somehow. The guns we need are still aboard a ship that is leaving and we need to catch up to it. I'm just trying to let the men who are actually sleeping sleep a bit longer before we start packing up. The wind will favor us, and we're much faster, especially now that the hull is clean. And we'll not want to start a gunfight in the middle of the night."

"You think things through, do you?"

"Excuse me?" Flint was looking directly at John now, actually interested in what he might say; John felt a little tug in his stomach at the sight of it, but could attribute it to neither fear nor greed.

"You don't think it's a bit reckless, with your hold on the crew as tenuous as it is? And you know it's tenuous, because you're out here pacing, alone, instead of conferring with your men."

"I'm not alone any longer, you've come up and started talking to me," Flint said low and quickly and without a trace of amusement. John bit his lip, but the dark had fully set in and he wasn't sure Flint could see. "Billy and Mr. Gates know what's happening and they're beginning to inform the men. That's how you heard about our departure. We don't have secrets on this crew."

"That's a fucking lie and you know it. You mean except yours?" John had somehow managed to shock himself with his own directness.

"What would you know about my secrets?" Flint said; his voice was still calm, still low, and it was not really a question.

John took a risk here and reached out, clapping a hand on Flint's shoulder, but not too hard. He knew this was the sort of context where physical contact could be taken as an aggression, even an attempt on someone's life. It suddenly occurred to him that he didn't understand why all pirate captains, but especially Flint, weren't constantly under watch from guards to prevent situations such as this, when someone that you definitely can't trust has approached you in the dark on the beach while you are alone and deigned to touch you.

Flint's eyes drifted to the hand on his shoulder but he didn't flinch. John guessed that maybe his eyes softened a little, but he couldn't see terribly well. He could smell the salt in his beard, feel the sweat and seawater that perpetually suffused his clothing.

John opened his mouth to answer the question, and thought for a moment. "Just that you have them, and that that's by your design." 

Flint stared at him, but John removed his hand and turned to walk back to his tent. He wasn't ready for the retort he knew he would have otherwise heard. The captain's composure rattled him somehow; so did the very real pang he'd felt in his chest when he touched him, like standing on the edge of a cliff and looking down into an abyss. And he didn't like being rattled--it made his process of discovery and grifting that much harder.


End file.
